The way many organizations, universities, and the media talk about the great aid options available to students, you half expect to walk into the university financial aid office and be bombarded with a frantic crowd of strangers waving handfuls of cash in your face. “Please! Take this money. Free money! Please take it!!”

Of course this isn’t true. There are a lot of ways to attend college affordably, but most of them involve actually paying for it. I don’t disagree with the notion of paying for my own education; that’s what this site is about, but the rosy myth of financial aid for all just simply ain’t true.

The fact is, all grants and scholarships are very selective and very competitive. And who can blame that? They should be selective. Nobody really deserves free money (except for me). Unless you speak Klingon, or you’re related to someone with the last name “Val Vakenburg” (real scholarships) you’re going to have a hard time getting grant money. But you might not know this if you listened to the “experts.”

The only people getting free money are the “experts”

Sites like Fastweb.com are a joke. Fastweb prides itself on having a database of “Millions of scholarships worth billions of dollars.” Yet what you’ll find out, if you manage to make it through the jungle of ad pages that hijack your browser every time you click a link on their site, is that most of Fastweb’s “scholarships” are actually essay contests organized by businesses. Ok sorry, I spoke too soon. Not all of them require essays: “Win $5,000 & Free MP3s - No Essay Required.” (Just one of the many scholarship opportunities I found on Fastweb.com!) Most other scholarship websites are like this as well. The only real scholarships I found on that site that I fit the criteria for were already listed on my university’s website.

What’s depressing is how easily these advice peddlers, and even universities will urge students to take on debt before the kids have even decided what they want to major in. You’ll see a lot of big numbers thrown around about how much financial aid money is available each year. Here’s a quote from one website about supposed financial aid myths: “In fact, more than $130 billion of student financial aid is available.” Oh, wow, that’s a lot of money I guess. Then I read a little further - “Less of this aid now comes in the form of grants, however; most aid is awarded through low-interest loans or institutional and other grants.” So instant debt is now considered financial aid? I guess in this great age of the credit card, bad and no credit loans, zero-down-mortgages, and pay-for-it-later furniture, no one else sees this as a problem.

Better ideas
Some colleges are trying to change this trend. One cool idea I’ve seen is used by The College of the Ozarks. Their students work 15 hours a week on campus, and their college tuition is free. If you work over the summer, they’ll pay for room and board too. My school is one of the few universities with a text book rental program. For 18 bucks a course, you can rent out your books for the semester.

Then of course there are people like me, trying to change things one blog post at a time. It’s really a noble cause.
Tony

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